Dean S.K. Ramesh sits down and talks Engineering with KCSN

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March 10, 2013

KAREN This is KCSN’s Conversations. I’m Karen Kearns. Today we’ll discuss ways to expand the study of engineering and computer science with Dr. S.K. Ramesh, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Cal State Northridge. Dr. Ramesh, thank you for joining me today.

DEAN RAMESH Thank you very much, Karen. It’s a delight to be on the program.

KAREN CSUN’s engineering program was recognized as the fastest growing program in the United States in 2010. How was that achieved?

DEAN RAMESH This is truly a wonderful accomplishment, Karen. Back in 2008, the American Society for Engineering Education surveyed approximately 215 schools; the condition being the schools had to have graduated at least 75 engineers during an academic year, and it turns out that Cal State Northridge had a 96 percent growth between 2005 and 2008. The number of under graduate engineering degrees that were rewarded – so we jumped from 97 in 2005 to 190 in 2008. The story behind that is that we support the faculty to mentor our students, tutor them in key academic courses, and we offer programs with scholarships for the students, internships for the students, so ultimately it’s about connecting the students to their careers, their future careers. And I’m not surprised to see that program is recognized with that distinction. Now during the past 5 years, enrollment in the college has grown by over 50 percent, but again I’d like to underscore that this particular statistic is not just about enrollment but about accomplishment. Taking students from the place where they are to graduating engineers, 5 and a half years since.

KAREN And that’s pretty serious, because you’re talking math and computer science and all kinds of things they must understand, correct?

DEAN RAMESH These are really challenging disciplines as we know, and it’s a matter of motivating the students, keeping them engaged in their activities and at the same time supporting them to succeed. So it really takes a team, a wonderful team of faculty and staff at the college that brings this about.

KAREN Are there any estimates of the number of engineers and computer scientists that the United States will need in the next 5 or 10 years?

DEAN RAMESH So this is a question that we as educators and engineering educators in particular are being wrestling with for the last decade or so. It turns out the United States graduates about 75,000 to 80,000 engineers per year with bachelor’s degrees, about 40,000 with masters degrees, and approximately 10,000 with doctoral degrees. Now the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that people need an approximate 20 percent jump nationally in the number of positions. Now you have to consider the positions that are lost due to attrition, due to retirement, et cetera, and then new people coming in to fill those ranks. So if you look at the United States today, say 2008 to 2010, there’s probably about 1.8 million engineers and computer scientists working across various disciplines. According to national estimates, that needs to go up by 20 percent by 2018. Now closer to home, the State of California is very very similar. We need to jump by about 23 percent between 2008 and 2018. And to give the listeners a sense of perspective, our work force or engineering work force accounts for roughly 15 percent of the nation’s engineers and computer scientists.

KAREN Wow. You’ve said that engineering is a renaissance discipline and that it’s intrinsic to society, and that it can really change the world. Please share some examples of how this is recognized.

DEAN RAMESH You know, this is really close to my heart. When I think about what engineers do, engineers design. They model. They build. They test, but ultimately they’re making products and processes that help everybody in the world. People that include engineers, and as such when I think about art, when I think about culture, when I think about art history, you find that they’re based on a very solid foundation, and then people have freedom of thought to express creatively their thoughts on how they can go about enriching the environment around them, and truly engineering is no different. We teach students the fundamentals. We teach them how to look at problems from different perspectives, and once they graduate, we equip them with the tools to really solve the problems that confront us as a planet. And it’s that’s respect that I truly believe that this is a profession that if you want to give back to society, there is no other profession you can be in other than engineering and computer science.

KAREN Stem fields and science technology, engineering, and mathematics are where there will be many jobs, and what we understand to be possibly a shortage of skilled workers for those high-tech jobs. How is your college working to increase the number of students in these areas?

DEAN RAMESH So I want to address this from the top, and truly, Karen, this is a multi-dimensional challenge. So not only do we have a shortage of qualified engineers and computer scientists, but we clearly have major gaps in the diversity of our work force. And focusing for a moment on the entire world, you can look at flatter declining engineering enrollments over a period of time. I mention the fact that the United States has graduated about 75,000 to 85,000 engineers every year, and that has stayed fairly flat for the last, I want to say, 25 years. Last February, President Obama came to the engineering and dean’s council and spoke to us about invasion, about creativity and entrepreneurship, and there was something that he said that sort of resonated with the deans and the audience. He said, “America has always been about innovation. For every Steve Jobs we need 10,000 others.” Now when you think about it and start quantifying it, the quantitative people that we are, intrinsically as engineers we said well, we’ve been graduating about 75,000 to 85,000 engineers a year. How do we go from that to the numbers that the president and the president’s council and job competitiveness is asking us to do? So we’ve laid out a path, if you will, to recruit, to retain, to graduate more engineers in a timely way. This is a project of the American Society for Engineering and Education, and the National Academy of Engineering. One of the fundamental things that need to change is the public’s perception of engineers and engineering has to be constantly adapted and corrected. Often times engineering and technology is presented in a way that misinforms the public resulting in decisions that block the path of children into engineering. A very quick statistic: out of the 83,000 engineering degrees that were awarded in 2011, the percentage of Hispanic students receiving those degrees was only 8 and a half percent. The percentage of African American students was 4.2 percent. This was in 2011, 2012. So how do we exchange this? What are some of the things we are doing in our college? Clearly you have to begin early, and you have to do it persistently without losing motivation. So we work closely with high schools. We have a program called AXIS where we allow qualified high school students to take courses that translate to computer engineering and science. We partner with our community colleges. We have a wonderful grant through the U.S. Department of Education, which is appropriately called AIMSS squared, and it stands for Attract Inspire Mentor and Support Students, and yes, we’re engineers, so we have to have a super script at the very end. With you the goal again is to take students through pathways, and I choose my words very carefully to show them there are multiple pathways through which they can approach engineering and computer science. It doesn’t matter if they’re in elementary school, preschool, middle school, or high school, or a community college. There is a path for them to be successful in engineering and computer science. And that, I think, is fundamental to our approach in the college.

KAREN And I think that goes back to your renaissance idea too where it embraces a lot of different areas too.

DEAN RAMESH Is absolutely does, and when you speak with engineers – and we just happened to have a career day a couple of days ago, Tech Fest, and we found out speaking with the companies that these engineers who graduate – again in the traditional disciplines; electrical, mechanical, computer engineering, computer science, et cetera – are now working in a variety of environments in the banking environment, in the health care environment, in the real estate environment. But there is something about the engineering way of educating someone, the analytical thinking, the creativity that comes with design, expressing yourself in all of those different ways, which I think is really making a difference, and it will make a difference in the lives of people.

KAREN The Massive Open Online Course is thought to be the one way that we might be able to increase access to higher education. How can MOOC courses help provide education for future engineers and computer scientists?

DEAN RAMESH Well, the first thing I’d like to say, Karen, here is that the MOOCs, the Massive Open Online Courses, and similar endeavors of the same genre are here to stay. If you look at Coursera today, they have approximately 2.8 million registered users. You have ADEX, which is a partnership with M.I.T. You have Audacity. There is just a growing number of these organizations. The fundamental thing to keep in mind is content as we know it will be readily accessible and available to students anytime, anywhere, and forever. That is a reality. So given this reality, how do we then work with our students, our future students, our students currently in our classes so that they can access this content in a meaningful way, and in a field like engineering, hands on is very critical. We need to do lab experiments. They need to be building cars. They need to be building planes. They need to be building information networks, energy systems, you name it. So how do we do this on line? A simple answer is you can’t quite do it online. You do need to get your hands dirty. You need to roll up your sleeves and do it. But it’s the audience. So let’s say you are a practicing engineer. Let’s say you are confronted with various choices. You are raising a family, or perhaps you are an international student that needs access to the material. Certainly we have the technology to deliver it, and increasingly people are looking at virtual labs as a way to expand on the hands-on experience. Ultimately the reason why these are going to be successful is because they supplement what text books cannot do. Text books are very static. Here you have a medium that is very interactive. I can personally speak for this because I taught myself to India through an endeavor called the IUCEE, which is the Indo Use Collaboration for Engineering Education, and last summer when I visited I was amazed to find out that my online class had over 600 students. And these are students that I interacted with twice a week, 10 weeks in a year, and we were covering material, but the next time I covered the class, what I’d have the students do is to actually go and view the materials ahead of time and use the time for interaction. So it’s a matter of engaging the students. It’s a very Socratic approach in my way, because it forces the students to think about it from different perspectives. It forces the faculty, if you will, to think about different ways of pedagogy and delivery particularly when it comes to an advancing field like engineering education. So I clearly think that this is an area that we need to continue to invest in, because it’s going to be wonderful, particularly for a campus like Cal State Northridge, which has a very diverse population. Many of our students are working 20, 30 hours a week. This gives them access to the material that they so desperately need, when they need it, where they need it, so that they can then be prepared to address challenges ahead.

KAREN One of the things some of my students have said they really like the online thing because they can go back and find it. It’s – you know, it goes with them with their phones and all their other things.

DEAN RAMESH You know, that is very true, and from an instructor’s standpoint, I used to joke and say that your mistakes live for posterity.

KAREN Yes, they do.

DEAN RAMESH But that’s all right. Engineering remember – it’s again about trying different things. We are often times present the solution as if it is the solution. But if you look at where we’ve come, you know, take the iPhone, for instance. It takes pictures. It takes videos. You can listen to music. You can send text messages, and occasionally we make a phone call with it, right?

KAREN Right.

DEAN RAMESH So when you think back to the time that telephones were first invented, I’m sure nobody thought about that. So in the same respect, I think we just need to be open to this. This is a very new medium. It opens up a lot of possibilities that truly enhance student learning. I think at the end of the day if you’ve taken a course through a MOOC, you will have the ability to have listened to the best and the brightest from all over the world, the ability to interact with students from all over the world, and that then makes you a much better engineer.

KAREN A multi-disciplinary team at the College of Engineering and Computer Science students developed an unmanned fully-automated robot. It was called Red Raven Intelligent Ground Vehicle, and that garnered a national championship in 2011. Can you tell us about this project, and the career opportunities that came with this type of endeavor?

DEAN RAMESH You know, I want to begin my response, Karen, by dispelling one of those urban myths, which is engineers have a hard time communicating. So Red Raven stands for Robotic Autonomous Vehicle Engineered in Northridge.

KAREN Okay.

DEAN RAMESH And so this was an award winning robot. It’s actually a two-time repeat champion at this competition that is sponsored by an organization known as AUVSI, which is the Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Society. It’s an international society. So they have a number of competitions that focus upon robotics, if you will, but intelligent robotics. So in this case, the intelligent ground vehicle competition is an opportunity for students in a Cap Stone senior designed course to build autonomous vehicle technology. Why is this important? You think about companies like Google. They are building the autonomous car. They are safer. They are smarter. They allow us to focus on other tasks, if you will while the driving is taken care of autonomously. Well, this particular competition has a number of elements to it. There is an autonomous challenge. So this is a challenge where an intelligent vehicle needs to travel a very complicated outdoor course while avoiding all kinds of obstacles. It has to stay within boundary lines, and it has to follow various navigational points. Is there is a navigation challenge where it has to find specific way points. So now you’re being timed in the competition. So how fast can you get to that point. There is a design challenge where this team of students has to get up in front of a panel of engineers and scientists and explain the nuances of the design, why they choose a particular technology, why they went the way they did. Now when you put all of this together, the vehicle really needs to be smart enough to determine the most effective path, because ultimately that’s what the challenge is all about, and one of the things that makes me really proud is that Cal State Northridge when we first started this competition, I want to say in 2006, we ended up about 19th or 20th in a field of 80. And we kept climbing steadily to the point in 2011 we ended up on top. Now we had the bull’s eye on our back literally, so in 2012 Red Raven 2.0 showed up and not just walked away – I love what they said in AUVSI. They said this may be a dynasty in the making. So it’s a pretty remarkable achievement, and when you consider the technologies and disciplines that play a part here, robotics, software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical computer engineering, materials engineering, these are all disciplines, but ultimately it’s the people, Karen, that make it happen. Over the last 5 years, we’ve probably had 105 students participating in the competition, and I look at the diversity of that student body. Over a third of them are Latino/Latina, over 15 percent of those students are women. This is something that to me we need to be incredibly proud of, because this is really the future of engineering. We are putting students together to work on intelligent, fun problems that ultimately they have not only fun accomplishing but they are showing to the world what they are capable of.

KAREN Are we going to have Red Raven 3.0 this year?

DEAN RAMESH You know, I’m not sure about the naming convention.

KAREN Okay.

DEAN RAMESH They did have another robot, Dr. C.T. Len As a faculty advisor for this team, and so we had another robot last year that actually finished third in the competition called Lenja. So I have to wait and see what they come up with. Once again, going back to the theme of renaissance and engineering, engineers are very creative people. I’m sure they will come up with a name that is going to amaze and astound all of us.

KAREN Okay. This is KCSN Conversations. We’re discussing ways to expand the study of engineering and computer science with Dr. S.K. Ramesh, Dean of the College of Engineering and Compute Science at Cal State Northridge. Dr. Ramesh, are there any other programs working to break down the silos of disciplines to create more entrepreneurs for the future?

DEAN RAMESH So thinking about this question, and what we just talked about in terms of Red Raven and the success in the robotics championship, a number of the students participated who in the 2011 and 2012 competitions came back and said, well, there is something more we can do with our winning technology. And they automatically turned their attention to the field of helping persons with disabilities. Now it turns out that Cal State Northridge has an internationally renowned program in the area of disabilities. We host an international conference. This is the 28th year that we’ve done this, which attracts over 4,400 people from all over the world to talk about visual disabilities, hearing disabilities, cognitive disabilities. Well, in this case the students said what if we were to take the same technologies but to use them to make a wheelchair more intelligent? In other words, a person that’s confined to a wheelchair who is a paraplegic or a quadriplegic can perhaps navigate better by using the same technologies. So this is one way, I think, in which we break down the silos, and looking back now over the last 5 years, we’ve developed a masters degree program in the area of assistive technology engineering. So why now and why a masters technology, a masters degree in assistive tech engineering? Thinking about the population of the United States itself, over 22 percent of our population will be over the age of 75 by the year 2030, and increasingly as we use these devices, and increasingly as we use these technologies, we need, I think, help – to put it very mildly – to live the quality of life that we’re used to. So there is a market out there, if you will, for life scientists, for biologists to work together with engineers to create robotics and processes that we take for granted everyday. So the masters in assistive technology engineering does precisely that, and this is one way, I think, we can foster entrepreneurship. We can bring people together, and often times the best solutions come when you bring somebody who is completely outside the discipline. When I look at our cohort, we have somebody that has a background in political science. We have someone who has a background in music. We have people who are biologists. We have people who are engineers, but when you put this group together, something magical happens, because it’s transformative in the way in which they’re able to support each other and ultimately develop products that one single discipline could never ever hope to accomplish.

KAREN How do we increase the number of women in engineering and computer science?

DEAN RAMESH You know, you’ve touched upon a point that has been a challenge to us for a number of years. Nationally just under 18 percent of the degrees are awarded to women, and over time although women comprise ultimately 20 percent of our graduates, a only make up about 11 percent of our engineering work force. So this has been a challenge, and this is one that the National Academy of Engineering has looked at very closely. In fact, there was a really great study by the University of Milwaukee a couple of years ago sponsored by the National Science Foundation that looked at this very closely, and the project is called a Project Of Women Engineers Retention, the acronym being POWER.

KAREN Okay.

DEAN RAMESH So they had some really excellent suggests on how to improve the situation. One of them being that you need to create clear, visible, and transparent paths to advancement. You need to provide training and leadership opportunities both technical and non-technical opportunities, have very clear work goals, and this, I think, is important that are not only relevant to the big picture, but also have a work place climate that fosters and supports women in engineering. You need to have a culture that allows women to balance work life priorities. This is absolutely important. And then more importantly, we need to have role models. We need to have mentoring. Now this is at the career phase, again, keep in mind 20 percent of the graduates are women, and only 11 percent of the work force are women, so that’s got to change, and it is changing. It’s changing more rapidly in some parts of the world down in the United States, but this has certainly caught the attention of educators, we’ve certainly caught the attention of industry. Many CEOs of companies whom I speak with have programs in place that reach out all the way to elementary to middle and high schools to foster young women to pursue careers in engineering and computer science. Having done that, once they arrive at their doorstep as engineers, they then need to provide them with supportive mechanisms that ultimately lead them to success. I think we can get there, but it’s a commitment that needs to be aspired by every single person in the engineering pathway.

KAREN As we talk about those model programs, what do we have in grade school and high school and especially to reach out to those women? Is there anything specific we should be looking at?

DEAN RAMESH So there’s a lot of programs, Karen, for example, engineering as elementary is a program that is originated from the Boston Museum of Science, and they have what is known as a National Center for Technology Literacy. So they’ve actually created curriculum materials that allows students, and in particular women, to look at engineering projects. We have project Lead the Way, which is an amazing program that allows high school students and now with the Gateway Coalition middle school students to participate in engineering activities. And again if we go back to what we said at the beginning of our conversation here, think about the activities that engineers do. Engineers design. They model. They build. They test. These are all the same kind of activities that we want to replicate in the classroom but age appropriate, of course. And so these programs are very successful not just because of the nature of the activities but because of the passion of the people who are running them, because they really care about it. There’s wonderful training programs in place that attract teachers to develop these curriculum materials. Here at Cal State Northridge we have a fantastic partnership with our college of education, the Michael D. Eisner College of Education with the College of Engineering and Computer Science that goes all the way from elementary education to high school education preparing graduates to be proficient in math and science teaching in our high schools but in particular, emphasizing the E in STEM where E is, of course, engineering.

KAREN You know, you’re currently serving on the governing board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. How does this society assist in the mentoring of future engineers?

DEAN RAMESH You know the IEEE is the reason, Karen, that I am sitting here before you having this conversation. Approximately 35 years ago I was a student branch member in my native India where we helped start a student branch of the IEEE. Today when you look at the IEEE, it is the largest professional technical society in the world with over 400,000 members spread across the entire planet. Now the IEEE has various missions, but perhaps the best way for me to address the question is to look at the IEEE. And the mission very simply says advancing technology for humanity. That, I think encompasses everything that the IEEE does. Specifically there are 3 programs that I want to mention to you. One of them is tryengineering.org. So try engineering is a program that we developed in partnership with IBM, which has 114 lesson plans. It has vignettes from practicing engineers. There is a section for parents. There is a section for counselors. There is a section for teachers. The lesson plans are age appropriate. You can be 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old, and you’ll find something there that excites and inspires you. If you are a university student there are 3,200 universities from 60 countries that are featured on the website. But more importantly, when I look at the impact of try engineering – we started this in 2007. It has now been translated into 9 languages. Last year alone try engineering had approximately 11.9 million hits, and 9.7 million downloads of the lesson plans. Now this is a program that reaches out directly to students. We also have a teacher in service program where engineers in the community work with teachers helping them deliver these lesson plans, and last but not the least, engaging students in the community. We have a program called EPICS. And EPICS stands for Engineering Products In Community Service. So we have engineers in the community who work with students to form projects that really help them. It might be a water supply project. It might be a lighting project in a village in Africa, or it just might be a road that needs to be built in a remote part of the world. All of these are projects that engineers in collaboration with the local students do, and in the process they show them engineering principles. So in that respect, I think the IEEE is doing a tremendous job, but we’re not complacent. We continue to grow, bus ultimately we believe that the better prepared our students are, the better our engineering education programs will be.

KAREN What advice do you have for students who are interested in pursuing a career in engineering and computer science?

DEAN RAMESH You know, this is a tough question, and it’s also a fun question to answer. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a group of middle school students, and I closed my talk with the following sentence, and I said, “To err is human. To engineer is divine.” Think about that. And after all it was St. Francis of Assisi who said, “Start by doing what is necessary then do what’s possible, and you’ll soon find yourself doing the impossible.” Now he may very well have been speaking about engineers, Karen, now that I think about it. Engineering is fun. You know, if you love solving problems, if you love working on technologies, that by the way, we are in the process of still inventing, and most importantly if you want to find solutions that benefit all of us in society, I can’t think of a better profession to be in than engineering.

KAREN And you’re also part of a team. I mean, you don’t just do this all by yourself, do you?

DEAN RAMESH Absolutely. You’re not only part of a team that is working on a technical problem, but you’re also a very culturally diverse team, which speaks multiple languages, brings multiple perspectives, and increasingly we are pulling in multiple disciplines that, I think, provide the creativity in engineering, which ultimately is going to benefit all of us.

KAREN Dr. Ramesh, thank you so much for joining us today.

DEAN RAMESH Thank you so much, Karen. It’s a pleasure to be on this program.

KAREN We’ve been talking with Dr. S.K. Ramesh, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Cal State Northridge. This has been KCSN Conversations, a weekly program examining civic, health, and cultural issues that impact our Southern California communities. If you have a topic to suggest for a future show, please write us at
. I’m Karen Kearns. This is 88.5 KCSN, a community service of California State University Northridge.